Crying with joy to Wham!
On Christmas, meaning-making and food
Dear friends,
It’s Christmas Eve. Twelve years ago, I buried someone on this date. Back then, I thought Christmas would always be a very painful time. But I was wrong, and how wonderful to be so. When my family put up our tree last week and added the baubles (or as Americans say, ‘ornaments’), I found myself crying with joy at my wrongness, to the sound of Wham!
I’ve been reading the poet Amy Key’s stunning memoir, ‘Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone’. The blurb poses the question, ‘What happens when the romance we are told will give life meaning never presents itself?’ and Key’s book feels like a manifesto for making meaning on one’s own terms, as well as determined examination of loneliness. Reading it put me in mind of Charles D’Ambrosio’s description of discovering MFK Fisher’s writing and being won over by ‘the right she assumed to be exact about her life’. Key describes the lack of fanfare the world allows single people (without weddings, anniversaries, birth announcements). But in her precise descriptions (of her grandparents’ house where nothing was wasted and dishwater was thrown over the flowerbeds, of painting her own home with friends, infusing care into its walls) she declares, a rich life is still unfolding here, a life resonant with meaning.
Whether we are partnered or single, so much of our meaning-making is indecipherable to others. I roll out pastry and cut it into little stars which I use to top my mince pies. I brought the jar of mincemeat back from my last trip to England, protecting it in my suitcase with a pair of thick socks. It is December and I am happy, and Christmas songs no longer fill me with grief: a personal wonder encoded in a nothing-much action.
I also finally read the essay ‘Play House’ by my friend Katie Rice in ‘Compound Butter’, a magazine of art about food. In it, Katie writes about the house she and I used to live in together and the way we all cooked and ate there. The piece is illustrated with great clouds of our roommate Aimie’s chilli-cumin-honey popcorn. Katie describes us eating cross legged on the floor with take-out chopsticks, the table littered with dripping candles and bottles of three dollar wine, a record turning in the background. And somehow, through her exactitude, she conveys the sense of play alive in that house, all our cheap ingredients coming together into shared meaning. It made me ache for the romance of friendship.
Tomorrow I’ll get up early and cook. Friends will bring over roast potatoes and a jar of cranberry sauce and eat with us. It will be low key, and hopefully lovely. And at moments it may be slightly sad, because it’s Christmas, so it’s freighted and all the best songs of the season have a streak of melancholy anyway. I’ll take it all. And perhaps I’ll try to write it down.
With much love1,
Anna
especially to anyone having a hard Christmas this year.